Tag: Design

In the nascent days of computing, the highly sought after feature we now call “dark mode” was the standard. Cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors got their green-on-black look from the phosphor inside of the screens. While this technology was long-ago abandoned, dark themes have re-entered the zeitgeist as the latest “new innovation.”

“It’s thoughtfully designed to make every element on the screen easier on your eyes,” Apple claimed in its announcement of the feature for iOS 13. But here’s the thing: there’s no real evidence that’s true. For people with astigmatisms (approximately 50% of the population), dark mode is worse on the eyes.

As Gizmodo reported in 2014, citing research by the Sensory Perception and Interaction Research Group, at University of British Columbia, white backgrounds act as a “crutch” for astigmatic eyes:

People with astigmatism find it harder to read white text on black than black text on white. Part of this has to do with light levels: with a bright display (white background) the iris closes a bit more, decreasing the effect of the “deformed” lens; with a dark display (black background) the iris opens to receive more light and the deformation of the lens creates a much fuzzier focus at the eye.

Follow the Leader Is a Losing Game

While there isn’t concrete evidence of the benefits of dark mode, at the end of the day, Apple is a tastemaker and hundreds of companies will now see this as a design imperative. The question then becomes: instead of playing follow the leader, how can brands leverage design to make themselves accessible to the most people possible?

“When we think about accessibility design, dark mode is a recent example of behavior change only coming as a result of following others, as opposed to being the one to take those risks,” says Senior Designer Jonathan Haggard. “Software and accessibility can influence brand in a great way, instead of being an afterthought.”

It starts with an acknowledgment that if you want to create something truly groundbreaking, there is no such thing as “a given.” It requires pausing to question those knee-jerk decisions you make without really thinking, like, “Oh, I’m building a website. First step: white page.” After all, when Tesla designed their car, they didn’t start with a gas engine.

It Ain’t Easy Being Pink

Take the Financial Times, for example. Instead of volleying back and forth between white or black modes as others have done for the last 35 years, they are unabashedly pink. As a design choice, it’s a risk. But it’s one that immediately differentiates them, increases the contrast, and may provide better readability over longer sessions, especially at night. They could have just stuck with white like everyone else, or followed-suit with Apple, but they have stuck to their guns.

Walk the Walk with Your Design

For another take on accessibility, consider Low-tech Magazine, a solar-powered, self-hosted website that has been designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing content online.

They opted for a back-to-basics web design, using a static site instead of a database-driven content management system. They apply default typefaces, dithered images, off-line reading options, and other tricks to lower energy use far below that of the average website. Because it uses so little energy, this website can be run on a mini-computer with the processing power of a mobile phone. In addition, the low resource requirements and open design help to keep the blog accessible for visitors with older computers and/or less reliable internet connections.

Countless brands tout the importance of accessibility and sustainability, but how many are actually walking the walk with their design choices?

Accesible Design Has Unexpected Positive Upsides

As we learned in our work with Alluma, a tech nonprofit whose solutions help people enroll in public benefits programs, designing for accessibility lends itself to unique executions. People tend to think about the word “disability” as a separate, static category, but it’s much more fluid than that. In taking the steps to make your website accessible, you will be helping everyone on the spectrum—from those with slight preferences to those with severe barriers.

“When you design for the ‘worst-case scenario,’ oftentimes people who are suffering in similar but less intense ways can benefit, too,” says Jonathan Haggard.

Accessible design will always save you time in the long run. It’s worth remembering that you and your customers are not fixed in space. Their preferences, abilities, and circumstances will change over time. Why not plan for those contingencies now?

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

After successfully completing the #100DayProject, Emotive Brand is thrilled to launch the Art of Symbols, a website exploring how ancient symbols inform contemporary brand design. Check it out!

The Art of Symbols

As previously discussed, the 100DayProject is a free art project started by Lindsay Thomson that takes place online. Every spring, thousands of people all around the world commit to 100 days of exploring their creativity.

“It’s a lot to commit to, 100 variations on a theme,” said Jonathan Haggard, Senior Designer. “Just like creating anything, the first 90 are the expected and routine, and it’s not until you feel like you’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel that the truly creative stuff comes out.”

The Power of Side Projects

At Emotive Brand, we’ve long believed that side-projects are not only important to keep us inspired and flex new creative muscles, but that it makes our client work much stronger.

“Side projects are critical for me,” continued Jonathan. “I like to keep my momentum going, so when I have a few hours in between client work, I can fill that with some creative exercise. This also pushes me outside of my comfort zone and allows me to learn about subject matter that I may be curious about, but haven’t had a reason to pursue.”

In terms of our next project, we will be exploring Emotive Branding—our methodology of digging deep into a brand’s products and services and finding emotional connections to the needs, beliefs, interests, and aspirations of its target audiences. It’s about aiming for a meaningful outcome from your commercial endeavors, and recognizing that when you touch people in meaningful ways, they pay you back.

Emotive Branding

When it comes to brand strategy, you may not always have all the answers—but chances are, you know exactly how you want your brand to make people feel. If you can hone in on that emotional impact: your employees work with greater purpose and get more satisfaction from their work, your customers become more loyal, and your supply and distribution chains become more responsive to your needs.

This isn’t about creating “emotional” advertising that gets people all misty-eyed about your widgets. Rather, it is about conveying meaning and evoking emotions that draw people closer to you—and sets you apart from your competition. When brands deliver in these ways, it is one of the most powerful ways to differentiate, grow revenue, hire top talent, and more easily deliver customer success stories.

“We are in the process of bringing new life to the 300+ emotions we use with all of our clients,” said Beth Abrahamson, Senior Designer. “Emotions are super intangible and super personal—one feeling can mean twenty different things to twenty different people. We hope that by honing in our interpretation of them, we can provide clients with an Emotive Branding language that is relatable, impactful, and artful.”

Whether you’re an artist, an agency, or just an avid fan of symbols and their histories, we hope you enjoy exploring the Art of Symbols. And as always, keep an eye on our Instagram to stay up to date with our creative projects.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Last month, we were visited by the good folks at Dalton Maag, an independent font foundry with offices in London and São Paulo, Brazil. They make type for branding, retail, and corporate clients that perform beautifully across print and digital environments.

After running us through some of their work, including an amazing demonstration of variable fonts – responsive type that can store multiple variations of a type family into a single font file – we got into a discussion on the differences between three components of evaluating type: legibility, readability, and likability. And what we discovered illuminated a new way to approach creative decision-making in general.

Legibility

First off, the legibility of a typeface is a product of its design and relates to the ability to distinguish one glyph from another when reading. Factors contributing to a typeface’s legibility include the following:

• X-height – The height of the lowercase in proportion to the caps. Traditionally, the taller the x-height, the more legible the typeface tends to be.
• Character width – The easiest type designs to read are those that have an “average” overall width. Very condensed or extended designs are less legible, especially for smaller settings such as text, subheads, and credits.
• Weight – Extremely light or heavy weights are more difficult to read, so if legibility is your goal, stick to something in the middle.
• Design traits – The overall shapes and design traits of a typeface. If too quirky or fussy, it will reduce legibility.
• Stroke contrast – The ration of thick to thin strokes.
• Counters – Enclosed or semi-enclosed negative shapes.
• Serifs, or lack thereof – While serifs are generally believed to enhance legibility, this is not always the case, as we’ll discuss later.

Readability

Readability, on the other hand, is related to how the type is arranged, or typeset, and therefore is controlled by the designer. The factors affecting type’s readability are more familiar to the average reader: type size, type case, line spacing, line length, color, and contrast.

For those outside the design world like myself, having a language and measuring system for evaluating type was an epiphany. Something that I assumed was completely subjective had an entire mathematical rubric behind it. If I could learn to see like a type designer, maybe I could change the way I make decisions.

Likability

So when we got to the topic of likability, based on the above information, I naturally assumed we would be crunching the numbers to land on the objectively best font.

In running a test for accessibility, Arial 14-point is actually not as accessible as some other fonts, explained Eleni Beveratou, Creative Director at Dalton Maag. Yet because Arial 14 point is what the test group was used to read in their daily life, they actually rated it as more likable and perceived it as more legible. In the end, the biggest contributing factor to likability is simply what you’re most familiar with.

“The likeability of a typeface has a major impact on whether someone will engage with a piece of content or not, despite research proving some typefaces more legible than others,” continued Eleni. “It is important to create inclusive and accessible reading experiences for all, regardless of reading ability or visual acuity. Inclusive isn’t synonymous with boring or monotonous; many typefaces can be inclusive while maintaining a distinct and fresh expression. This is the challenge that we need to embrace.”

In other words, what you read most, you read best. Despite all of the research, despite all of the proof points, despite our supposed obsession with trailblazers and disruptors, people tend to like what they’ve seen before.

Untrain Your Likability Reflex

Perhaps that seems obvious, but it’s a subtle sea change in how we should approach decision-making. Think back to your last team meeting, pitch, or even lunch order. How often when you say, “I like that” are you actually saying, “I’ve seen that before”? How often, when you reject an idea, are you rejecting its actual content vs. the implied fear of change?

For a minute, let’s briefly wander into the minefield of American politics. Think about how the word likability is used. Who gets to be likable? Who invented it? Whose intelligence gets to be described as inspiring and whose is off-putting, cold, inauthentic?

High-achieving women, sociologist Marianne Cooper wrote in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article, are judged differently than men because “their very success – and specifically, the behaviors that created that success – violates our expectations about how women are supposed to behave.” When women act competitively or assertively, rather than warm and nurturing, Cooper writes, they “elicit pushback from others for being insufficiently feminine and too masculine.” As a society, she says, “we are deeply uncomfortable with powerful women. In fact, we don’t often really like them.”

The Curse of Familiarity

In design, politics, and life in general, we are all vulnerable to our own biases. For those in charge of a brand, their job is often to maintain an image. Familiarity is a gift! It’s the easiest way to get approval with the least amount of friction and risk. But the curse of familiarity is stagnation. If you’re only ever making decisions based on what you like, you’ll never grow.

Remember the cycle of Facebook redesigns in the 2000s? Each new aspect – the Mini-Feed, poking, the Graffiti Wall, Open Graph, Newsfeed, Timeline – spurred dozens of petition groups with thousands of members demanding its removal. And then when they did? You guessed it: dozens of petition groups with thousands of members demanding its reinstatement. As satirized in the comedy series Jake and Amir, “Garbage becomes perfect over time as you get used to the garbage and forget what made it so bad. Like, you don’t get the internet.”

Change Is Hard

Reading the world, just like font, requires a set of criteria beyond likability. Familiarity is a detriment to making ground-breaking work. Next time you’re evaluating creative or presented with an opportunity for change, don’t be afraid to embrace the unknown. It might just become your new favorite type.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Last week, the world was given two small wonders: War Paint, a hyper-aggressive makeup brand exclusively for men, and Liquid Death, canned water designed to look like beer. Two “wellness” brands aimed at men, cloaked in the visual language of skulls, tattoos, and violence.

What can these two bizarre companies teach us about the role of gender in branding? And is breaking down male stigma in the wellness space simply a design problem?

Branding … For Him!

Let’s start with War Paint. Their 13-second ad features a heavily tattooed man using various products, flexing his pecs, and adorning himself with a skull ring. Notably missing from this peacocking is how the actual makeup looks on the guy’s face. But that’s not the point of this ad. The point is to disrupt your expectations of makeup and remind you, to a cartoonish degree, that this is for herculean men.

Everything about this brand – the militaristic association of its name, the tattoo parlor visual language, the chant of its tagline “makeup for men, designed by men, for men” – is attempting to shift perception. And in theory, that’s a good thing. For decades, many men have felt uncomfortable with the fact that they have human bodies that require basic care, like moisturizer or water. If War Paint is working toward a future in which men can boldly engage in self-care, that’s progress, right?

Unfortunately, everything about their execution is decidedly backward. Online, many people were off-put by their singular expression of what it means to be a man, and we’re hoping to see a larger spectrum of masculinity represented.

In a tweet attempting to clarify its positioning, War Paint wrote: “If females can have products just for women, why can’t men? Our aim is to allow makeup to be gender neutral and to do that we must have male-specific brands also.”

As Vox writer Cheryl Wischover responded in her piece, “Achieving the goal of increased gender neutrality by making stuff for the underserved ‘males’ demographic struck many as counterintuitive or even nonsensical. The truth is that it probably is still hard for some men to walk into a Sephora and buy makeup. But selling makeup with muscles and war is not going to take away that stigma any time soon.”

The Shape of Water

Let’s shift to Liquid Death, the punk rock canned water aiming to “murder your thirst.” In a way, this feels like a thought exercise for aspiring salespeople. Take the most basic thing possible – water – and make it irresistible. Former Netflix Creative Director Mike Cessario has done just that, raising a new seed round of $1.6 million for his new company. In total, he’s raised $2.25 million for, and I can’t stress this enough, water in a tallboy can. Backers include Biz Stone of Twitter and founders of Dollar Shave Club and Away.

According to Cessario, he’s not solely marketing to the heavily male punk and death metal crowd indicated by the skull logo; he’s targeting the “straight-edgers”– those who eschew drugs and alcohol in a scene often known for both – and doing so under the guise of eco-friendliness because a single, shiny nickel from every $1.83, 16.9oz. can sold will support cleaning up plastics from the ocean.

It would be a shame to deny Liquid Death’s sense of humor. They produced a truly bonkers video called, “Hey Kids, Murder Your Thirst,” which wouldn’t look out of place on Adult Swim. Similar to War Paint, they are aggressively (and joyfully) disrupting the status quo of their category. But here’s the thing: this whole brand narrative is still supported by outdated modes of masculinity. Healthy habits – drinking water, taking care of yourself – shouldn’t need to be draped in distortion and blood to appeal to men.

Why Is Self-Care Gendered?

Ideally, self-care has no gender. Over-indexing on masculinity to make something appeal to men doesn’t encourage actual perception shifts. Quite the opposite, it teaches men to only respond to the violent, the blunt, the obtuse.

As Erika Nicole Kendall noted in her essay, “Marketing has the ability to convey powerful messaging, drive consumer behavior, and legitimize messages we frequently see and hear about ourselves. It simultaneously guides our aspirations and affirms how we see ourselves. When the marketing used to sell wellness brands to the public validates questionable ideas about gender – and, for that matter, race – we should collectively cringe.”

War Paint and Liquid Death are hardly the first, and they won’t be the last. There’s Dude Wipes, which are baby wipes, but for dudes. There’s Man Salt Muscle Soak, which are bath salts, but for men. You’ll never guess who the target audience for the candle company Man Cans is. (Hint: it’s men.)

Perception Shifts

Those who work in branding have a real opportunity to shift perception – if they approach this challenge from a place of curiosity and empathy. What does it mean to be a man in 2019? Whatever we want it to mean. It can be intersectional, non-binary, and yes, masculine, if the aperture of that masculinity is open enough to allow for other identities to exist. Wearing makeup, drinking water, lighting a candle, or taking a bath shouldn’t rattle your identity. If it does, you’ve got bigger problems than branding.

Hair loss company Keeps and wellness brand ForHims are steps in the right direction. Through diverse photography and minimalist design, they are expanding masculinity by focusing on what it means to be human, not just male. There’s still an edginess and personality to their copy, but it refrains from veering into the overtly macho.

“We hope to enable a conversation that’s currently closeted,” goes the ForHims’ about page. “Men aren’t supposed to care for themselves. We call bullshit. The people who depend on you and care about you want you to. To do the most good, you must be well.”

In the productivity-economy, caring about yourself can feel radical. The role of good branding makes those magic moments as accessible, inclusive, and frequent as possible.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Image credit